A

• Ad Exchange: A digital marketplace where publishers list inventory and advertisers bid in real time.

• Ad Density: The ratio of ads to content on a webpage; high density often signals poor user experience or MFA risk.

• Ad Fraud: Any practice that manipulates ad delivery, views, or clicks for illegitimate gain (bots, spoofing, fake installs).

• Attribution: The process of assigning credit to various ad touchpoints that lead to a conversion.

• Authorized Sellers (ads.txt): A file publishers use to declare who is authorized to sell their inventory, reducing domain spoofing.

B

• Bid Request: Information (device, location, user data) sent from the publisher to bidders when an ad impression is available.

• Bot Traffic: Automated, non-human traffic intended to mimic real users, often to commit fraud.

• Brand Safety: Measures ensuring that ads don’t appear near inappropriate, offensive, or unsuitable content. Read more in our blog post here.

• Broken Supply Chain: When multiple unauthorized resellers exist between a publisher and buyer, inflating costs and reducing transparency.

C

• CPM (Cost Per Mille): The cost to serve 1,000 ad impressions.

• CPC (Cost Per Click): Cost paid when a user clicks an ad.

• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): Cost for a completed user action, like a purchase or sign-up.

• Click Spamming: Fraud technique where clicks are faked or attributed to the wrong source to steal credit for installs or conversions.

• CTV (Connected TV): TV content streamed over the internet (e.g., Roku, Firestick), increasingly vulnerable to fake impressions.

D

• DMP (Data Management Platform): A platform that manages audience data for targeting.

• DSP (Demand-Side Platform): A system advertisers use to automate buying ad space across multiple sources.

E

• eCPM (Effective CPM): Revenue earned per 1,000 impressions, across different buying models (CPM, CPC, CPA).

• Exchange Quality: Assessment of an ad exchange’s inventory for fraud risk, MFA exposure, and transparency.

F

• First-Party Data: User data collected directly by a brand (e.g., site behavior, email addresses).

• Fraud Rate (IVT Rate): The percentage of ad impressions deemed invalid (bots, fake users, spoofed CTV).

G

• GIVT (General Invalid Traffic): Obvious, easily detected fraud like known bots and spiders.

• Geo Masking: A fraud tactic where IP addresses are spoofed to appear from premium geographies.

H

• Header Bidding: An auction method where multiple exchanges bid simultaneously for ad inventory, increasing competition and publisher revenue.

I

• IVT (Invalid Traffic): Impressions or clicks that are fraudulent or non-human.

• Impression: A single ad view by a user.

L

• Lookalike Audience: Audience built to mirror characteristics of an existing group, often through machine learning.

• Long-Tail Inventory: Ad space from smaller, niche, or low-traffic websites — can be valuable but higher fraud risk.

M

• MFA (Made For Advertising): Sites designed purely to maximize ad impressions and revenue, often with low-quality or meaningless content. Read more in our blog post here.

• Modeled Conversions: Estimated conversions calculated when direct attribution is impossible due to privacy restrictions.

O

• Open Exchange: A public marketplace where inventory is sold to any buyer programmatically.

• Optimization Score: A score or index measuring the efficiency of a campaign or inventory source.

P

• PMP (Private Marketplace): A premium programmatic environment where only select advertisers are allowed to bid.

• Pre-Bid Filtering: Screening inventory before the auction to weed out fraud, MFA, or low-quality supply.

Q

• Quality Score: A composite measure of inventory quality — typically factors in viewability, fraud rates, MFA exposure, etc.

R

• RTB (Real-Time Bidding): Technology that enables the buying and selling of ad impressions in milliseconds.

• Reseller: A third party authorized to sell another publisher’s inventory — too many resellers can lead to transparency issues.

S

• SSP (Supply-Side Platform): A platform that helps publishers sell their available inventory programmatically.

• SIVT (Sophisticated Invalid Traffic): Hard-to-detect fraud that mimics human behavior (e.g., residential proxy bots, sophisticated CTV spoofing).

• Supply Path Optimization (SPO): Strategy of buying ads through the most direct and transparent sources to reduce fraud and costs.

T

• Tagging (Data Tagging): Adding metadata to categorize web pages and users for targeting and reporting.

• Third-Party Data: Data purchased from external providers rather than collected directly from users.

• Traffic Shaping: Fraud tactic where fake traffic is mixed with real traffic to mask bad activity.

U

• Undisclosed Resellers: Unauthorized intermediaries selling inventory without publisher permission, often causing inflated CPMs and fraud exposure.

• User Engagement: Measurement of how users interact with content, used to differentiate real traffic from fake.

V

• Viewability: Whether an ad was actually seen by a human (standard is 50% of pixels visible for 1+ second).

• Vertical Fraud: Category-specific ad fraud where bots target a particular industry (e.g., health, finance, education).

W

• Walled Garden: A closed ad ecosystem (e.g., Meta, Google) where data and inventory are tightly controlled and limited to inside access.

• Whitelisting: Practice of only buying from approved publishers to reduce risk.